In advance of next week’s Housing Scrutiny meeting which will be considering the performance of Partners, please find attached a note submitted by a Partners tenant on the organisation’s resident scrutiny arrangements. This may inform discussions at the meeting.

The meeting will be held on Tuesday 6th February, 2018, at 7.30pm in Committee Room 4. The pre-meeting will be held from 7-pm in Committee Room 3, at Islington Town Hall.

Volunteers wanted
The ILA are looking for a ‘secretary’ to take minutes and distribute them regularly to all the directors and asks for a volunteer to undertake this essential part of the work, to assist with the smooth running of the organisation. If you are interested please log into http://www.ila.org.uk/faqs/contact-form.

If you wish to join or renew your membership please contact “Support” section of our website ww.ila.org.uk where you can obtain the appropriate membership forms.

The ILA are looking for a ‘secretary’ to take minutes and distribute them regularly to all the directors and asks for a volunteer to undertake this essential part of the work, to assist with the smooth running of the organisation. If you are interested please log into http://www.ila.org.uk/faqs/contact-form.

If you wish to join or renew your membership please contact our website ww.ila.org.uk where you can obtain the appropriate membership forms.

Please impress upon any other leaseholders that it is in their interest to attend these meetings regularly…..

Basically, in a very few words, it outlines many of the problems, and aspirations, associated with being a council leaseholder in the borough of Camden.

In my opinion its content could/should be common to all council leaseholders, regardless of which borough they live in since it forcefully stresses the plight of a deliberately ignored proportion of the electorate…until, of course, the council present us with their grossly inflated charges for substandard work…

I just wish I had written it…

Dr Potter

Chairman: – Islington Leaseholders Association (ILA)

Report of the Camden Leaseholder Recharges Scrutiny Panel

Cllr Meric Apak (Chair) writes:

I cannot help but speculate whether, before my time as a Councillor, my predecessors have been in this same position, aspiring to resolve leasehold related issues in council housing.

My personal aim through this scrutiny process has been to shine a torch on our failings as shown by the evidence we have collected, learn from this, and make recommendations to unravel this complex tangled mess which we seem to have allowed to fester.

Alas, for too long now we seem to have turned a blind eye to a culture which treats our leaseholders as second class residents – at least that’s the impression I get from my postbag. We need to accept that leasehold tenure in council housing is here to stay and that our leaseholders make a positive contribution to Camden.

Leaseholders are neither an irritating adjunct to council housing nor an ATM machine, and we need to differentiate the ordinary vast majority, from the minority who used the Right-to-Buy scheme for property speculation purposes.

We need to tap into Leaseholders’ knowledge and expertise to help Camden drive costs down, particularly in supervision and management. Services need, particularly in today’s straightened times, to provide value for money and to be comparable with those procured elsewhere in the marketplace, whilst complying with health and safety requirements. Not driving costs down can only result in unjustified charges to leaseholders which will not be recovered, which in turn can only be met by the Housing Revenue Account – thus pushing rents higher. So when we say leaseholders are “subsidised by tenants”, are we not highlighting our own failure?

We need to come up with ingenious methods to successfully engage with and meaningfully involve leaseholders (together with tenants) during the consultation process and convince them from the outset that this process will deliver a high quality service and value for money.

For this to work, there needs to be ‘buy-in’ from leaseholders that the survey and estimated cost of works to be done is worth the paper it’s written on. We then need to execute the agreed work, on time and to the agreed budget. This is obviously a simplification of what is needed – perhaps even a fanciful aspiration some might say.

Our success will be measured by how much culture change we can bring about throughout the officer ranks of the Council. We have a real opportunity to expand the ‘Right First Time’ philosophy, and to instill ‘buy-in’ for this concept right from the very junior member of staff to the most senior manager, and through to external providers and partners involved in delivering services to our leaseholders and tenants.

I would like to extend my thanks to the panel members for assisting me in this process. I would also like to say a special thanks to our Assistant Director Stuart Dilley, who agrees that there does need to be a culture change within the Council. Special thanks also to our committee clerk Vinothan Sangarapillai who has been instrumental in capturing the evidence through his diligent note taking.

But most of all, I am truly grateful to the many leaseholders for the large number of case studies that they have submitted to the Panel and took the time to describe the many harrowing experiences they have endured under the unsatisfactory historic arrangements – thank you.

The ILA are looking for a ‘secretary’ to take minutes and distribute them regularly to all the directors and asks for a volunteer to undertake this essential part of the work, to assist with the smooth running of the organisation. If you are interested please log intohttp://www.ila.org.uk/faqs/contact-form.

If you wish to join or renew your membership please contact our website ww.ila.org.uk where you can obtain the appropriate membership forms.

The ILA are looking for a ‘secretary’ to take minutes and distribute them regularly to all the directors and asks for a volunteer to undertake this essential part of the work, to assist with the smooth running of the organisation. If you are interested please log intohttp://www.ila.org.uk/faqs/contact-form.

If you wish to join or renew your membership please contact our website ww.ila.org.uk where you can obtain the appropriate membership forms.

Dr Potter would like as many leaseholders as possible to attend this meeting, and question the need and validity of the outrageously high charges the council expects us to pay for exceedingly poor quality work to our homes.

The next Housing Scrutiny Committee will take place on

Date: Monday 29 February 2016

Venue: Committee Room 1 at Islington Town Hall, Upper Street, N1 2UD

Time: 7.30pm

To view the publicly available agenda information, which has just been published, please click on the link: Agenda details

The following items are included in the agenda:

No. Item

Formal Matters

A1 Apologies for Absence

A2 Declaration of Substitute Members

A3 Declarations of Interests

A4 Minutes of Previous meeting

A5 Chair’s Report

A6 Order of Business

A7 Public Questions

Scrutiny Items

B1Responsive Repairs: Witness Evidence

B2 RSL Scrutiny

B3 Capital Programming: Final Report

Urgent Non Exempt Matters

Exclusion of Public and Press

B4 Exempt Reports ( if any )

Please attend the Scrutiny meeting on the 29th of this month, and ask them to explain their position regarding your roofing guarantee’s…REMEMBER…IF THE GUARANTEE LIES WITH THE CONTRACTORS/SUPPLIERS AND THEY GO BROKE/CLOSE DOWN/GO BANKRUPT…ETC…AND THERE IS NO INSURANCE BACKING…BANG GOES YOUR GUARNTEE’S
AND YOU WILL BE CHARGED AGAIN FOR ANY FUTURE REPAIRS, OR REPLACEMENT, TO YOUR ROOFING…!!!

The ILA are looking for a ‘secretary’ to take minutes and distribute them regularly to all the directors and asks for a volunteer to undertake this essential part of the work, to assist with the smooth running of the organisation. If you are interested please leave a message here.

Dr Brian Potter Chairman (ILA) has asked me to forward this attachment onto you all from Partners regarding the questions Dr Potter and leaseholders raised at the ILA meeting on Wednesday 13 January 2016 and Partners answers. Please click on the attachment.

Please view below the questions raised by Dr Potter to Partners at the meeting

· When does rolling 5 years Cap run from end of works, end of snagging or making good repairing problems created?

· If the Cap is set when costs were incurred does that mean from when the first cost or last cost in a particular set of major works was incurred?

· Can you confirm that partners no longer make good any damage – created by poor major works? E.g. damp, blown plaster, ruined decorations?

· Can partners conform when the” making good” policy changed, as Partner used to tell Lease holders that they would repair all the damage that arose as a consequence of Partner Major works?

· What guarantee are partner giving these days on the major works they do on Roofs, Windows, damp works. Decorating before partners can rebill Leaseholder for repairing the faults?

· Partners have previously said that they’ll fix problems while they hold the street properties contract & that their roofs should last 30 years?

· Does that mean e.g. that if the 16 year PFI2 contract is terminated in 2022 that any roofs being repaired now are only in effect guaranteed for 8 years?

· Why do Partners never give us a copy of invoices of their expenditure despite it being the law and despite repeated asking?

· Why do Partners repeatedly hand out new bills for repairs to major works that have been badly done in the recent past?

Guest Speakers: The following Partners Islington representatives will be attending the ILA meeting

Shaun Holdcroft, Director of Resident Services, Hyde HA

Steve Blake, Director, Rydon Maintenance

Clifford Yeend, Divisional Manager, Rydon Maintenance

Tom Irvine, Service Improvement & Engagement Manager, Partners

Michelle O’Toole, Communications & Complaints Manager, Partners

We will attend the meeting between 7pm and 8pm, and will give a short verbal presentation on the services we provide to our leaseholders and areas we are currently working on. Following this, we will be pleased to take questions from the group.

The ILA are looking for a ‘secretary’ to take minutes and distribute them regularly to all the directors and asks for a volunteer to undertake this essential part of the work, to assist with the smooth running of the organisation. If you are interested please leave a message here.

• IT’S great to see the Tribune has started to report on Islington’s housing problems once again.

What was not reported in this article was that during the scrutiny committee meeting I asked Partners representatives how many surveyors it employed to service the properties it manages on behalf of the council; its answer was approximately 12. Since Islington Council employs another 60 surveyors to service the rest of its housing stock the total number of surveyors paid for by residents is more than 70, and according to the council, the majority of its surveyors are not even Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors qualified.

Since leaseholders’ bills for cyclic work show that all contracts are inclusive of 11 per cent for “professional fees” to the council, surely we are entitled to expect that the council employs only fullyRICS-qualified staff?

If the council is using potentially unqualified staff (not chartered surveyors) to assess the condition of our homes, how do we know that the costs and quality of the work, for which we are grossly overcharged, actually represents true “value for money”?

The answer is simple. We need to be able to freely inspect the schedule of rates appertaining to the contracts which have been agreed between the council and its contractors. Since we pay the bill we should be able to see just what the council signs us up to.

Curiously, the council not only refuses to allow us to view this document, but has recently attended a court hearing in order to make certain it can reserve the right to restrict legislative compliance to a degree which suits its purpose – basically, to stop residents seeing the cost of their repairs.

In order to challenge this position those concerned need to be able to pursue their case without fear of financial pressures.

Therefore, we are currently examining the possibility of following a course of crowdfunding to finance a challenge. If you are prepared to assist financially please email us on Islington.Leaseholders@hotmail.co.uk.

Remember, if the council does not have to show how your money is spent, it’s you who will have to pay the hidden costs.